Aggressively priced for a tenkeyless, RGB-lit keyboard with mechanical switches, the G410 is a fine "gateway" pick for budding e-sports fans and PC gamers not craving macro keys.

Logitech was a latecomer to the mechanical-keyboard game, but now it's making up for lost time with a range of colorful, feature-laden models designed to shore up its position, especially among the professional gaming community. It has a serious advantage, too, as it's one of the first names that come to mind when people think of keyboards, and it has the marketing and R&D budgets to enter a market the way General Sherman entered Atlanta.

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The G410 Atlas Spectrum ($129.99 MSRP) represents the company's entry-level "tenkeyless" board (i.e., lacking a numeric keypad) with full RGB illumination, allowing gamers of modest budgets to step up to a pretty fancy keyboard for just $129. That's on the cheaper side of things when it comes to multicolor-backlit mechanical keyboards. (The competing Corsair K65 RGB, for example, sells for $150.)

Unlike other mechanical keyboards in the market that include number pads, wrist rests, and USB pass-through ports, the G410 Atlas Spectrum is bereft of additional "encumbrances," allowing it to be unplugged quickly and stowed away in a backpack should the need arise for mobility. Logitech says it's designed for professional gamers who need to travel from one LAN competition to the next, but we have a hard time believing players at that level really need to shop for keyboards, or that being required to unplug a USB cable is somehow a deal-breaker. It's also positioned as an entry-level RGB mechanical gaming keyboard due to its price and features, a "gateway keyboard" for aspiring competitive gamers.

However you look at it—for competition or casual fun—it's a super-stripped-down keyboard, as it features the tenkeyless design and just a single USB connector for the interface. It has no full wrist rest, no USB pass-throughs, no dedicated media buttons or volume dials—nothing other than the compact keyboard and the USB cable in the box.

Logitech notes on its Web site that a tenkeyless design has certain advantages for gaming. It removes the number pad that is typically located on the right side of the keyboard, which otherwise forces your mousing hand to be further to the right than what is natural. (Reps from some other makers of tenkeyless boards have dropped the same justification for tenkeyless designs on us.) With that onerous number pad removed, your hands can be more naturally spaced. Just remember: 15 or so less keys also means 15 or so fewer pricey mechanical key switches that the maker has to include—so you ought to be getting a price break versus an equivalent full-width keyboard.

Design

Since it lacks a number pad, the G410 Atlas Spectrum feels quite small and compact. It measures just 15 inches across, by 7.3 inches deep. You can adjust the height/tilt via a pair of typical flip-up feet on the underside…

The G410 is a mechanical-switch keyboard; mere mortal keyboards typically use "rubber dome" technology, in which a springy (some believe, "mushy") silicon bubble provides the key bounce. But instead of using the ubiquitous Cherry switches—found, until recently, in most other mechanical keyboards on the market—Logitech uses its own switch technology, which it calls Romer-G. The company designed the Romer-G switches to be easy on your fingers, requiring just 1.5mm of travel and 45g of force to actuate. Compared to a Cherry MX Red switch, the usual light-touch choice among Cherry switches for twitch-happy gamers, these are approximately equivalent, and require linear pressure to actuate. Logitech's switches are not clicky-sounding at all, but they do provide a tactile "bump" upon actuation.

The G410 also provides full per-key RGB backlighting, and it is customizable via a software utility, ARX, that you download from Logitech. You can choose among a handful of preset color patterns offered by the software, or customize the board loadout to your liking by marking certain keys in certain colors. The options are quite extensive, and we also like that you can disable the backlighting altogether by simply pressing a key at the top of the keyboard. Also, unlike the behavior of the Corsair Strafe RGB, when our PC went to sleep, the lights on the keyboard did not shut off. They instead changed to a blue color, allowing us to easily input our password to resume our computing.

Built into the design, the lighting notwithstanding, the WASD cluster is set apart with a special design atop those four key keys…

There's not much more to the overall design apart from a curious tray near the top edge. The leading edge of the G410 includes a slide-out dock that's a simple plastic holder for your mobile phone. (It comes fully out of the keyboard and stands alone.)

To complement it, you'll need to download an app for either Android or Apple iOS named ARX Control. It's supposed to let you look at information on your mobile device while in-game. (More on that in a bit.) When you're not using the dock, you can just slide it back into the keyboard.

Okay, with the hardware basics out of the way, let's take a closer look at the software.

Software

The G410 Atlas connects to both desktop and mobile software to help you get more functionality out of the keyboard. Whereas we sometimes ignore a mouse's software, for a keyboard like the G410 Atlas Spectrum it's absolutely essential, mostly because it's fun to tweak the lighting characteristics.

The software is fairly easy to use and uses a graphical interface to guide the user through the various options. Not surprisingly, the very first page with adjustments is indicated by a light-bulb icon and lets you adjust the lighting. Under lighting, you can select one of three types of lighting: Freestyle, Zones, or Effects.

Within Freestyle, you can set each key individually in any color you like, or groups of keys. Thankfully, the software lets you drag across large swaths of keys and have them all become selected.

The Zones setting lets you adjust the color of preset zones and or add new ones. By default, the WASD keys are red and the arrow keys are blue, but you can customize these in any way you see fit.

When you select the Effects option, you can choose from a drop-down menu with preset lighting effects that include Color Wave, Breathing, Fixed Color, Star Effect, Color Cycle, and Key Press. You can adjust small parameters within these effects too, such as the speed at which the keys "breathe" or execute the wave.

The next section, Profiles, lets you create profiles for specific games, but there's no real relevance for it on this keyboard, since the board lacks dedicated shortcut keys, or in Logitech lingo, "G-Keys." By default, there is just one profile, and it lets you disable certain keys when the "game" button at the top of the keyboard is pressed.

Out of the box, this button disables the Windows key and the Alt key on the right side of the keyboard that opens menus in Windows. As far as we were able to discern in our trials, that's all you can really do in the Profiles window, which is to add keys to the disabled list upon entering Game Mode.

The last section is a heat map that shows your most used keys and also measures your typing speed. This is of mild, passing interest but largely a useless feature, in our opinion. It's fun to look at…once.

Logitech also makes a mobile app for Android and iOS that's designed to connect with the ARX desktop software. The idea is to display information about your system and active game on your mobile phone or tablet.

We never got it to show anything, though, in our weeks with board, so it left us more confused than amused.

Performance Testing and Conclusion

We spent a few weeks typing with the G410 Atlas Spectrum and found it to be comfortable right from the outset. The keys seem to require a bit more force to actuate than the Cherry MX Red board we normally use, but it wasn't difficult to get acclimated to. If anything, the added resistance made our typing more accurate, as we had to be a bit more deliberate when tapping the keys.

The backlighting on the keys is very well confined to each key, as opposed to how it radiates out from underneath the keys on certain competing keyboards. This means that in low light, only the actual letter on the keytop glows, instead of the entire area around the key, which we appreciated…

One issue we had was with the media controls. We live in an apartment and so are often adjusting the volume of whatever we're listening to, in order to keep from disturbing the neighbors. Like other keyboards without dedicated media-control buttons, you must press the Fn key in combination with another key to play media, pause, and adjust volume. The problem is that the icons for these actions are etched on the leading edge of the keys in grey, the keys are black, and the backlight only shines through the top of the keys. So, in the dark, it's impossible to see any of the playback icons. You could make this easier, theoretically, by assigning these media-related keys a specific color, but you'd need to memorize which keys are where, and that just seems like compensating for a poor design choice.

This keyboard also lacks any dedicated macro keys, but personally, we seldom use those, so that's not a deal-breaker for us. Of course, many other keyboards' software packages will still let you assign macros to ordinary main-layout keys, as (for example) Corsair does in its Corsair Utility Engine (CUE) software. But that is not possible on this keyboard. We don't mind this lack of functionality ourselves; just pointing it out for you, dear reader. Some of you will beg to differ, to be sure.

Two things we did miss, though, are a wrist rest and the inclusion of a USB pass-through port. We don't like resting our palms on our desks and much prefer a wide, detachable pad to use. To Logitech's credit, the G410 has something of a half-size palm rest built into the left side of the keyboard, but that leaves your right palm with nothing to do other than sit on the desk, an arrangement that felt a little odd and unbalanced. We also use the USB pass-through on our current keyboard for our gaming headset, so its absence was sorely felt.

Other than those gripes, we enjoyed our time with the G410 and found it comfortable, well-built, and easy to use and adjust to. We liked how easy it is to change the lighting options, a big step up in simplicity versus our experience with Corsair keyboards in the past, due to the complexity of the CUE software. However, we did miss one feature available on Corsair's RGB keyboards, which is the ability to import custom lighting patterns created by the community.

The ability to turn off the keyboard backlight with just one button press is a great feature to have, as well, but it would be even better if you could cycle through varying levels of brightness before turning it off. As it stands now, it's just an on/off toggle.

We were also curious about the ARX Control and the included dock, but we never found a use for it. According to Logitech, it requires implementation on the game end, and there is an ARX Control SDK aimed at game developers. Looking at it from the POV of a casual user, though, we couldn't see right off how it's supposed to be used or what it was supposed to show us, as every time we opened the app, the app just stared back with a blank screen. Even if it did show us information about our system or the game we're playing, we feel like looking down at our phone or tablet midgame is a recipe for getting killed, and quick. We get that Logitech is trying to capitalize on the ubiquity of smartphones, but this seems like a feature relatively few people would employ.

Overall, we were impressed by the G410 Atlas Spectrum. It's easy to use, has a decent cool-feature mix for an entry-level mechanical model, and the lighting is superb. We'd recommend it as a budget alternative to the Corsair K65 RGB if you're not quite macro-maniacal, as the Logitech software is much, much less sophisticated. If you're simply looking for a tenkeyless keyboard with fantastic RGB lighting, no more, look no further.

Logitech G410 Atlas Spectrum

Logitech G410 Atlas Spectrum

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